


Come What May

by portraitofemmy



Series: the one with the dog [11]
Category: The Magicians (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Baking, Depression, Dogs, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Established Relationship, Fluff and Angst, Hugs, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Not Season/Series 05 compliant, Post-Season/Series 04, Quentin Coldwater Lives, Slice of Life, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-17
Updated: 2020-01-17
Packaged: 2021-02-25 12:00:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,352
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22295605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/portraitofemmy/pseuds/portraitofemmy
Summary: A bad brain day keeps Quentin up at night. Featuring— cuddles, puppies, bread, music and loving partners.
Relationships: Quentin Coldwater/Eliot Waugh
Series: the one with the dog [11]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1404727
Comments: 47
Kudos: 280





	Come What May

**Author's Note:**

> This is the fic I need, right now. I hope it brings you all some measure of peace. 
> 
> Unbeta'd, all mistakes are my own.

It was fucking hard to watch Q cry.

Which, objectively, is probably just an expected consequence of loving somebody. Empathy, compassion, all of that. With Q in particular, crying wasn't even the worst state you could find him in. If he was crying, he wasn't numb to the world. Eliot tries, he really does, he tries to remember that. But it's so fucking hard, to ignore the itch behind his breastbone that says if Quentin is crying, something _is wrong,_ something he needs to fix. It's so hard to remember the core tenant of loving Q, that sometimes the thing that's wrong has no fix, or sometimes there's nothing wrong at all. 

He tries to remember all of this, as he comes out into the living room in the middle of the night. He'd woken up alone, which is not wholly unusual. He usually wakes up if Q gets out of bed for one reason or another, as he’s the light sleeper of the two of them, and Quentin prone to restlessness. But he'd gone to bed first, wiped out from a day of running around the city with Kady chasing a baby hedge coven determined to stir shit up, and when he woke up at 2am, Q's side of the bed was still made. Empty and cold, it said 'I have not been slept in' about as clearly as was possible for an inanimate object.

He finds Q in the living room, curled up in a little ball sitting next to the dog's bed, Dessy in his arms, tears leaking into her fur. She's not yapping and trying to lick his face, just wiggling occasionally in his arms, so– they've been like this for a while.

Deep breath. _You can't fix it_.

"Can I sit with you?" Eliot asks, soft, leaning against the arm of the couch. When Q nods, Eliot sinks down against the wall, fingers out to greet the puppy, who licks his hand eagerly. _Good girl_ , he thinks, _reinforcements have arrived_. Q doesn't flinch away from him, so Eliot sets out stroking long, gentle patterns across his back over yesterday's hoodie. Carefully he asks, "Did something happen?"

"No," Q chokes out, stuffed up and clogged sounding. Worry twists in Eliot's chest, and god, he wants to fix it. It's not fair that he can't– 

"Alright," he says, patient, slides his hand up to squeeze tight at the back of Quentin's neck, shake him a little. He goes limp like a kitten under Eliot's hand, swaying his warm, heavy weight into Eliot's side. "Are you cold?"

"A little," Quentin mumbles, cheek settling on to Eliot's shoulder. Eliot nods, doing the tuts for a warming spell one-handed. It's basically an invisible blanket, can only trap the heat generated by their bodies, but with the three of them here, that'll be enough. 

He has plans, about how to handle this– a couple minutes of good, I'm-here-you're-safe touch, and then get Q up and get some water in him, maybe tea if he's not gonna willingly drink tap water. Get him to change out of the hoodie into something that feels less like his worst memories, get him something to do if he can't sleep tonight. Maybe kiss him a bunch, on his nose and mouth and cheeks and hair, because Q loves to be kissed and Eliot loves him _so damn much–_

He means to do all of those things, but the warming spell is actually pretty effective, and he's so fucking tired, and his own body-brain connection is pretty wired to think 'oh, Q's touching me? we're good, we're safe, we can do what we gotta do' at this point. So he doesn't mean to start to fall asleep, but he does, drifting in and out against the weight of Quentin against his side, the smell of him, the sound of his quiet, hitching breath.

"El," Quentin whispers, shaking his leg a little, "El, come on, you can't sleep here, you're going to fuck up your back."

"My back's always fucked up," Eliot slurs, turning to grind his face in Quentin's hair. "Wanna be with you."

"I'll come lay in bed then," Quentin protests, nudging Eliot again. And it's tempting, god it's tempting, but– it’s all too easy to slip from the 'crying to process emotion' place into the 'can't get out of bed' place, and this one is definitely, definitely the better of the two. 

"No, I'm okay," Eliot protests, sitting up and wincing, because– yeah, fuck, ow. Quentin gives him a knowing, resigned look, and Eliot rolls his eyes. "I'm fine, don't look at me like that. Come on, if we're going to be awake, let's do something, yeah?"

He's almost surprised when Quentin doesn't argue. "I bought that lemon curd the other day," he says, fingers scratching at the head of the sleeping dog in his lap. "Want to make some lemon bread?"

"Yeah, baby, that sounds good."

The rhythm of baking together is so familiar, it's almost thoughtless. Quentin starts the process of blooming the yeast while Eliot gets out bowls and measuring cups and flour. Trusting that Julia's got sound-blocking wards set up in her room, he gets out his phone, flicking open the playlist he secretly thinks of as _theirs_ , songs that each of them takes comfort in. The fact that it opens with a boppy Taylor Swift song makes Quentin smile, a little secret in the corner of his mouth, every single time.

He does this time, too, just the tiniest little curl of dimple as he's carefully measuring out flour. Eliot's seized by the irresistible urge to kiss him, right there, right in the corner of his mouth where all his feelings live. So he does.

It makes his smile get a fraction bigger, for a heartbeat, and Eliot is so in love, so in love, so in love. "Can you soften the butter for me?" Quentin asks, swaying into Eliot's arms for a moment, then away again to dump the measuring cup out into a bowl.

"I can do that," Eliot agrees and kisses his cheek one more time for good measure before he pulls away.

They work in silence for a while. Quentin is, honestly, the better bread maker between the two of them, but even if he wasn't, Eliot would sit back and let him run the show on this one. Eventually, they run out of two-person tasks, and Eliot finds he is content to simply stand at the counter, watching Quentin's strong, sturdy hands work the dough. He's confident and sure in this, and shaped entirely like the rest of Eliot's life.

"It's so dumb," Quentin says eventually, in a quiet voice that barely carries across the inches between them. "How much of my life I've spent feeling alone. When I've never really been alone, not really. I had– my dad, and maybe I never quite felt like he understood me, but god knows he at least tried to.And I also had Julia and James, then. Now, I have you. And Julia, still, somehow, after everything. And I've got– Alice, maybe, I think, on our good days, and Margo too, I guess. It's so dumb that I have all that– and I still feel alone a lot."

He finishes kneading as he talks, dropping the ball of stiff springy dough into an oiled bowl to rise. The low lights they’d turned on in the kitchen cast shadows across his face, stain his eyelashes dark against his cheeks as he looks down at his hands, absently picking bits of dough off of them. “Saying your feelings are dumb is just a way to get down on yourself for having them,” Eliot says gently, as gently as he can without getting Quentin’s hackles up. “I know that trick, I use it a lot.”

“Doesn’t mean it’s not true,” Quentin mumbles to his hands. “It is dumb.”

The problem is, of course, that Eliot’s usual reassurances– that Quentin’s loved and he’s not alone in his struggle– would sound incredibly fucking hallow following that. And it’s not like Eliot doesn’t _understand_ , it’s not like he’s never stood in the middle of a crowded room full of people he cares about and felt so disconnected from them that he might as well be a different species. They might handle it differently, Eliot by being loud and calling attention to himself while Quentin shrinks away inside, but it doesn’t mean the feeling is unfamiliar. But– “It’s _incorrect_ ,” Eliot says carefully, reaching out to touch his fingers gently against the point of Q’s elbow, “because you’re _not_ alone, but that doesn’t mean you’re not experiencing that.”

“Thanks for the validation,” Quentin snips, dry, turning away towards the sink.

 _Patience_ , Eliot reminds himself, staring at the countertop. _You raised a toddler_ , _you can handle a bad brain day_. In the lull between them, the music swells, some mid-2000 sad-tinged crooning thing, all bouncy guitar riffs and drums. 

_Hey, don't write yourself off yet. It's only in your head you feel left out or looked down on. Just do your best, do everything you can. Don't you worry what their bitter hearts are going to say._

It’s one of the Quentin songs on this playlist, and Eliot imagines him at 16, so far into his depressive isolation that he couldn’t see a way up from the bottom. What did that boy need to hear?

“I don’t know if it helps, but you won’t feel like this forever,” he says to Quentin’s back, his hunched shoulders, hair swinging in his face. “It sneaks up on you, but it’ll fade again. And the people you love aren’t going to leave you in the meantime.”

“I know that,” Quentin sighs, crossing his socked feet as he scrubs dough off his hands. “It’s just– I don’t even know how to talk about this, Eliot, because nothing you can say is something I don’t already know, like, in theory.”

“I don’t have to say anything,” Eliot offers, and god– that’ll be hard, because he wants to– always wants to fix it. 

Q turns around, arms bracing on the counter behind him. His eyes are welling up again, and fuck– Eliot’s going to cry too, he realizes, suddenly, because he– It’s _Q_. Every single bit of Eliot’s insides are tangled up so tightly with Quentin’s, how is he supposed to– but Quentin’s doing that thing where he decides to be brave, and Eliot needs to meet him there. He just needs to.

"Sometimes I just feel like I don't even know who I am anymore. And I just get so angry with myself, because like– I shouldn't feel like this. I shouldn't– be up in the middle of the night just thinking about how I’m a bad person and I’m going to end up alone and I kind of want to smash my head against a wall until I break my fucking neck–" Quentin stutters to a stop, looking guiltily up at Eliot, who's stomach feels like it's making friends with his knees right about now. "I'm sorry, that's– I love you, I know you love me, that was– cruel, I'm sorry–"

"It's okay," Eliot says, gentle, stepping up into Quentin's space. "I know you think it– it's hard to hear but I'd rather you say it out loud than carry it on your own."

"I hate this," Quentin says softly, the tears in his eyes finally breaking free again, spilling down his cheeks. "Why can't I just– why do I have to keep being like this?"

"Because you have treatment-resistant depression," Eliot replies gently, reaching out to cup Quentin's face in both his hands, thumbing gently through the tear tracks. "That's not who you are, though. You feel like you don't know who you are? I can tell you that, if nothing else. I know who you are."

"Who am I, El?" Quentin asks, dully. "Besides the person keeping you out of bed at 3am."

"Well, you're Lady Desdemona's favorite dad, for starters. You're Julia Wicker's best friend. You're the love of my whole damn life, so write that down. You're also Ted Coldwater's son and Arielle's husband and Teddy's father, because those things never stopped being a part of who you are. You're a magical mender, who fixes things other people can't. You're a high strung super-nerd, which is my absolute favorite kind of person." This gets a laugh, half-broken and wet. "You're a man who loves with his entire heart. Bravely, courageously so. You're a person who never stops fighting, ever. Also, you're the love of my life, did I mention that?"

"You might have," Quentin jokes weakly, reaching out to settle his hands on the curve of Eliot's waist. "That guy sounds pretty great."

"He is," Eliot promises, sliding his hand back into Quentin's soft hair. "Look, if we've hit a plateau with this, with how much of this we can handle on our own, then we'll find you a therapist–"

"Yeah, because that's worked so well for me in the past," Quentin cuts in bitterly. _Patience_ , Eliot reminds himself. _Patience and love in the face of fear_. 

"I'll do it if you do."

Quentin blinks up at him, startled. "I– Really?"

"Yeah," Eliot agrees, though the idea makes his skin _crawl_ , but– "Like an accountability buddy, right?"

"No offense, Eliot, but the shit you need to work through is going to make it seem like you're having a psychotic break."

"Listen, if there are magicians who are podiatrists, there's got to be at _least one_ in this city who's a therapist," Eliot points out, slipping his arms down around Quentin's neck. "This isn't an ultimatum, baby, it's an offer. If you think we've hit the end of what we can handle with meds and dogs and baking, it might be a good next step. Just think about it?"

"I'll think about it," Q agrees with a sigh, pushing forward until they're chest to chest, breathing into a hug. His head tucks in warm and familiar into the crook of Eliot’s neck, perfect little thing, exactly hug-sized. "Thanks, El."

Out of words, Eliot just nods, the scratch of his beard catching a little in Quentin’s hair, arms around his shoulders. Q doesn’t seem inclined to let go, and god, honestly, Eliot isn’t either. It’s the middle of the night, and it feels like there’s no one but them in the whole damn world, if they decide to stand in the middle of the kitchen holding each other for the entire 40 minutes it takes the bread to rise, who gives a fuck? Not Eliot, not with Quentin’s arms around him, strong and sure. 

The song playing out of Eliot’s phone on the counter changes, sweeping and majestic, one of Eliot’s this time, and he smiles a little into Quentin’s hair. It’s an easy thing to send them swaying, revolving slowly on the spot, a middle school slow-dance with absolutely no room for Jesus left in between. Quentin, predictable, is willing to be lead, holding on to Eliot and moving with him as the music builds. 

“ _But I love you, until the end of time_ ,” Eliot sings softly, right to Q, just to Q. “ _Come what may. Come what may, I will love you until my dying day.”_

Q can’t pick up the duet, of course, he’s never even been able to carry the tune for a lullaby, but that’s fine. Eliot can sing both parts, sliding into a falsetto that makes Quentin giggle, makes his fingers curl in against Eliot’s shirt. They revolve slowly, in the dim light of the kitchen, as Eliot sings the same promise over and over again. Maybe it would serve them better than Satine and Christian. 

“I love it when you sing,” Quentin sighs once the song’s wound down, sliding not exactly smoothly into The Bleachers screaming in defiance that they wanna get better. But Quentin pushes up onto his toes, kissing Eliot’s chin and then his mouth– soft, and god, Quentin asks for more kisses then he hands out, generally. It’s rare to be kissed _by him_ , and it makes Eliot melt a little, the sweetness of him, the kindness. Eliot feels _loved_.

“That’s lucky for you, I do it a lot,” Eliot jokes once he’s got his mouth free to speak, and it’s– it’s putting distance between himself and the feeling, probably, and that’s– he needs to not do that. Cupping Quentin’s cheek, he rests their foreheads together, nose to nose. “I know it might not help right now to tell you that you’re never going to be alone because I’m always going to be here, but I feel like I need to say it anyway.”

“It doesn’t hurt to hear it,” Quentin admits, giving Eliot a little squeeze. 

Eliot’s starting to get sleepy again by the time the bread is ready to go into the oven. All this closeness, an armful of warm boy, the smell of yeast rising is making him want to– want to curl up on a sitting bench by a fire on another planet, in another lifetime. He can be content, probably, to sprawl out on the couch and flick on the TV instead. 

“Bake-Off rewatch requests?” he calls back to Q, who’s carefully fitting his shaped dough into the loaf pan Kady got him for Christmas, charmed to heat evenly on all sides. 

“The gay bread one feels thematically appropriate,” Q calls back, and Eliot grins, flipping to the episode in question and feeling incredibly fond of his partner, this language of familiarity they’ve built between the two of them. 

Q disappears into their room for a minute, but he immerges quickly, having shed his jeans for sleep pants and the hoodie for one of Eliot’s sweaters, carrying his soft grey microfleece blanket. The sweater is too big for him, sliding down over his hands, and the possessive lizard part of Eliot’s brain that goes just feral for Quentin wearing his clothes comes up against the part that wants to wrap him up and feed him soup.

It’s entirely possible that Eliot loves this boy way too much. Except for how it’s not possible that Quentin could ever be loved too much.

He drops down on the couch at Eliot’s side, clicking his tongue at Dessy who hops up on the couch with all the alacrity of a dog who spends way more time on the furniture than she’s supposed to. Eliot doesn’t mean to fall asleep, he really doesn’t, but Quentin spreads the blanket out over the three of them, and the next thing Eliot knows the timer on the oven is going off. 

“You can keep sleeping,” Quentin murmurs, as he’s dis-entangling himself from the blanket. Dessy, kept awake way past her bedtime by her favorite human, is passed the fuck out in Eliot’s lap and does not deign to stir, even at the beeping. 

“No, I’m good,” Eliot mumbles, blinking. “I want carbs.”

“It has to cool,” Quentin reminds him, smiling when Eliot makes a face, and leans down for a kiss which Eliot gives, happily. The lemon-y smell in the air intensifies as Quentin opens the oven, rich like butter and sharp like citrus. 

It’s nearing a time at which it would be reasonable to eat breakfast, by the time Q declares the bread cool enough to eat. They eat thick slices smeared with butter standing in the kitchen, and it’s good, all Quentin’s bread is good, but this one is a little tart and a little sweet, chewy and moist. Quentin leans with his head against the ball of Eliot’s shoulder, arm around his waist, eating one-handed. It leaves Eliot pondering the miracle of the universe, that Quentin’s right-handed and he’s left, that they can hug each other and eat bread at the same time. 

How it feels like just that little bit more proof that they were always meant to be here.

“Thanks,” Quentin says, softly, into the early morning light. “For reminding me I’m not alone.” 

And really, what is Eliot to do but kiss him in reply?

**Author's Note:**

> I can be found as portraitofemmy on most places, but check me out on [twitter](https://twitter.com/portraitofemmy) and [tumblr](https://portraitofemmy.tumblr.com/). Thanks for reading!


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